If you gave a bank teller a rare coin accidentally when you were making a deposit from your change jar, do you think they'd give it back?
If by accident transferred £2000 to buy something rather than £20.00 then would you expect the company to refund the difference? In the UK you'd be legally obligated to and society as a whole would consider your morally obligated to and I don't see either of those things as problems.
You didn't buy it, the company has explained the error and asked for it to be returned. As long as they bear the cost of doing so then people should be obliged to return it. Is it any wonder why there's looting in the States when there's a disaster etc when the attitude seems to be screw others for everything you can get away with; maybe it would be better to get back to trying for the high ground and "doing unto others, as you would have done unto you".
I'd certainly suggest the improved labour laws you list if not simply because I don't see why we wouldn't want everyone to have such basics. There was an article on conditions in an Amazon warehouse in the UK recently and although it was hardly inspiring it certainly made me glad for the laws we have in place:
> The right to parental leave (no firing because your wife had a kid and you need to be somewhere else).
> Expecting employees to pick items from above shoulder height or the ground being clear grounds for compensation in the case of injury; a legal system that would help fun the legal action and rules such that false solutions (like ladders you aren't given enough time to use) would be no defence.
> A company is not allowed to expect unpaid work as part of standard duties (travelling to a designated rest zone is work) and reasonable standards on length and quantity of breaks.
> The legal requirement to provide 28 days holiday pa and to only restrict or mandate this if there is a clear business need
I'd never suggest the UK is perfect in this regard but whenever I see a story about an employer in the US treating employees like consumables to chew up and throw out it makes me feel a little better about the fact I have to pay a penny or two more to buy things packed by people treated like humans rather than animals.
Right after I'm finished telling it to the families of the post carriage drivers who lost jobs when the telegram took off, the lamp lighters who lost jobs when electric street lights were invented, and the stable hands who got laid off when the auto-mobile replaced the horse for most transportation.
It used to take the vast majority of the time and efforts of society just to find and collect enough food not to starve. It's incredibly naive and short sighted to think that the concept of farming that decreased the work in foraging and hunting vastly was somehow a retrograde step or fundamentally different from automating picking stuff up and putting it in boxes. The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.
One of the weirdest arguments against legalising prostitution that I've ever heard was "No child grows up thinking 'I want to be a prostitute'"; as if somewhere out there are thousands of kids who want to be cleaners, warehouse drones, fast food cooks, temporary farm workers etc.
Children fare best when they have two parents in a stable home.
All other factors being equal that is true; although I have seen no evidence to suggest the gender or sexuality of the parents changes this. It is also categorically shown that better educated parents and wealthier parents tend to produce happier and more 'successful' children. I wouldn't be at all shocked to find that children brought up by a well educated, high earning single homosexual 'fare better' than children brought up by uneducated and poor married parents; that wouldn't however make me want to put in place laws to try and stop poor married couples having children.
We just recently, just, passed laws allowing gay marriage in the UK. In the UK we have very little open hostility to homosexuality, especially in the media. What that meant is that the majority of our representatives that voted against it (and lots did) made arguments based on marriage being a religious concept or, more strangely, for the purpose of founding a family.
One of the more memorable moments in the political debate was when a 50 year old female MP pointed out the hypocrisy of a colleague who made this argument by pointing out that he had just recently attended her wedding knowing full well that given her age she could never bear children. It seems apparent to me that the family argument is a cover for a different prejudice, as I know of no one using it who would object to the elderly or infertile getting married.
I think the point, though I'm not the original poster, is that marriage can and arguably should be separated from the legal rights of 'registered couples'. For example, if two close friends or siblings live together in later life then why should they be unable to share pensions etc just because their relationship never included physical attraction.
Churches, synagogues etc could still hold marriage ceremonies as could not religious institutions but a government official would register the couple as part of that process.
To be fair this isn't actually a new concept. One of the American founding fathers (I think, give me a break I'm not American or 250 years old) said something like: I must be a general so that my sons can be doctors and lawyers and their sons can be sculptors and artists.
There are people who are incredibly deprived in the world. Wouldn't helping them if we have the spare time and resources help uplift all our spirits? Wouldn't the pursuit of fundamental truths be the scientific or philosophical be a worthwhile endeavour when the need to build low quality consumable crap decreases?
What the founding fathers, and even we today, haven't really grasped is that we're obsessed with having 'more' such that we work nearly as many hours now even though our productivity has increased monumentally and yet feel less fulfilled.
With all of that said, "no human jobs are being taken" is complete, utter BS.
Nah it's probably true and yet completely misleading. Amazon has increased its headcount 400% over 5 years, so it's probably true that they'll keep all the staff they currently have but cut down on seasonal hiring and not need to hire more people as they continue to grow. Ultimately it's neither a problem or their fault. Human advancement is built upon finding ways to decrease work and the reason Amazon is doing this is because we choose to buy from the cheapest company not the one employing the most people etc.
When the US government gives me the option to signup to being spied on, explains in its terms what it will do with the info etc then I'll be the first to agree it's the same thing. But they aren't; so let's stop with the stupid strawman attacks on these companies and welcome anything they do, no matter how cynical the reasons, to push the government to leave us the fuck alone.
Yes. He might not have had the ability to do anything to stop it by being President but if you are elected to that position and then realise that what is going on under your watch is wrong, unethical and against the fundamental principles of your country and that, furthermore, the system is such that you cannot effect the changes required via the authority invested in the office of President then you should have the courage to resign and say why.
Maybe if you weren't too lazy to work out what they were responding too you'd have realised he was saying that the employees of the agency shouldn't be doing bad things if they don't want to feel bad because the president doesn't want to be associated with them at the moment.
It could be directed at anyone with a conscience. He said don't do things that you'd feel back about doing if you don't want to feel bad. That's not remotely like saying "we can look at whatever we want because only people who have done things they don't want us to see should care".
That they are "dismayed that President Obama has not visited the agency to show his support" should be their clue that its time to look for honest work.
I entirely disagree with the level, lack of oversight and fearmongering, of the security services currently. That said, when you've been doing this kind of shit for over a decade and getting regular pats on the back for it, the people as a whole love it etc I can see why they would take being hung out to dry hard. The government seems to be doing everything it can to let the NSA be the focus of blame here even though it almost certainly knew what was going on and likely condoned most of it.
Your exactly right. Unfortunately far too many people on here have already decided that anything open source is perfect and thus anything negative being reported, happening to or being linked to open source must be attacked.
Being open source isn't an excuse for breaking the law. Open source advocates will often highlight the fact that the code is available as meaning that it can be checked to ensure there's nothing hidden in there after all. You wouldn't have people on here defending Microsoft if they got sued for including a piece of freely distributed software in their product containing illegal functionality even though there's no difference (except they don't like Microsoft and love open source).
But they shouldn't have to pay damage caused by others.
They shouldn't have to pay for all the damage caused by others however I think the case can be made for considering the damage caused by the whole group when punishing individuals involved. On a basic level a DDoS goes from ineffective to partially effective to effective when more people take part and on another level their involvement helped build up the critical mass behind the attack.
It costs virtually nothing to put up a sign and fence and is pretty much standard protocol. If vandalism was so bad in your area that you had to take considerably more action like paying guards, changing site layout etc then vandalism has cost you that money. Society normally puts a premium on punishments/fines etc to account for three (or more) things 1/ the odds of getting caught and 2/ the disproportionate costs crime can cause and 3/ to act as a deterrent.
If I steal £10 off someone in the street but then get caught a £10 fine won't put me off doing it again because I'm never worse off for doing it. £10 also isn't the real impact of my crime. Stealing the money may mean that my victim couldn't afford the bus and so lost 2 hours wages, they could feel unsafe in public, it could discourage other people from travelling to that area.
My crime, and the crimes of others, in combination have caused this and it is right that punishments consider it.
I don't agree with them, I don't like many many things about anonymous etc but punishing 14 comparatively minor parts of a DDoS attack as though they caused all the damage isn't moderate, responsible or effective. There is a difference between giving them a punishment that has a deterrent affect and this nonsense.
The issue, imo, is that an embarrassingly small number of people are being prosecuted for this (surely hundreds, or thousands, of the perpetrators existed in the US or countries that would cooperate. Instead of doing things properly and punishing a lot of people moderately, they are going to drop a bomb on 14 chumps and fully ruin their lives. Parts of the state are trying to avoid criticism about catching so few people by victimising the few they have.
It won't be an effective deterrent because so few people have been caught that the people involved will continue to think that the odds of being caught in future are tiny.
Have you read the contract by any chance? Of course you haven't. Do you have any idea what so ever if the contract includes a provision saying that you accept that it is not the airlines responsibility to ensure that the destination country won't reject you? Of course you don't. So you're someone with plenty of willingness to spout opinion and fuck all knowledge to base it on. If only people on here would stop sharing opinions based on nothing more than there uninformed and imagined version of what should happen. 5 minutes research on google could tell you whether people typically get refunds when this happens, then you could post something informative telling the rest of us about it.
Sadly it is not. The DHS is responsible. Unless the airline is lieing, the DHS would be responsible for refunding the cost of the ticket.
You clearly don't understand how the no fly list operates. Airlines aren't allowed to tell someone they are rejecting them because they are on the no fly list (god knows how she got them to tell her). As you'd typically turn up at the airport and be turned away without explanation you're not going to get compensated by DHS because you'd never know, or be told, that they had anything to do with it.
I suppose you could theoretically try and start a lawsuit against the DHS if you got turned away from a flight that the no fly list applies to. However given that the list is secret so as to, supposedly, stop evil people realising the US government knows about them they aren't just going to say "oh you caught us".
I tell you what. America can ignore any district where the average household income is less than 1.5x the average household income in Shanghai? That would be ~$14,500 a year... Oh you mean you want to ignore American districts with vastly higher incomes than the highest income city in China because you see this as a competition to win, rather than a helpful warning that your education system isn't producing good results? Fine. You can just ignore it then, the rest of us will use it to work out how to improve our education systems and we'll see who made the right choice a decade from now.
Yeah. We should teach to the test like the South Koreans, I mean obviously we weren't teaching kids basic mathematics and problem solving skills before because who needs those right?
The amount of people who dismiss these tests who have absolutely no idea what they are testing, the methods etc really is quite incredible. I actually find it quite comforting that in the UK our coverage of the results has largely been acceptance of the fact our relative performance has fallen and some soul searching about how we deal with that; do we learn from Germany and Poland and how they reform or from places like South Korea with amazing results but extremely unhappy children.
Countries that dismiss the tests (seemingly a more common response in America) can stick there heads in the sand but the problem won't go away. If they don't make improvements now then they will pay the price 10+ years from now when the kids leaving school can't get into top jobs, universities etc because graduates from other countries that have improved outclass them.
You can certainly make a case for comparing a single city in a country against an entire country being misleading. However I really can't see the justification for trying to dismiss this because countries like Singapore are more urbanised. So what, it doesn't matter that Americans are crap at fundamental subjects like mathematics because some of them don't come from cities?
It might be easier to have a high standard of education in a more urbanised country but that doesn't stop it being a problem if you have a poor standard of education. Singapore is a country and has a population of over 5 million. Hong Kong is probably more a distinct country than Puerto Rico is and has a population of 7 million.
In general the view of UK schooling is that rural areas have better schools than most city areas. Getting good teachers into and improving schools in major cities like London and Birmingham has been an ongoing issue for government. That said rural areas in the UK are hardly remote by US standards.
That's one way you could look at it, especially if you think that an artist should be paid the equivalent of maybe £0.25 for an album sale. At less than £0.002 per sing play on Spotify that's what the artist would get for my playing a typical album around 10 times start to finish.
It's a shame that the debate seems to be dominated by the two extremes. The artists and record companies who want, for obvious reasons, music to cost more so that they can earn lots of money vs people who think copyright should be abolished and artists should have to make money only by touring, finding a patron or donations.
What I'd be interested to know is, would Anssi Kela have earned more than 2.64 Euro-cents per play of a sold album? If we made a not unreasonable assumption that an album is the equivalent of 30 full play throughs (I buy some I play through less, some people would listen on spotify but wouldn't buy it) then that's the equivalent of 80 Euro-cents profit to the artist per album sale. That sounds like a low return, but not when compared to what I expect an artist would typically earn on an album sold by a record label. If the 30 playthroughs is equivalent to an album sale metric is remotely reasonable then it would imply this artist is getting plays equivalent to 735 sales per month and is earning £584 a month for them.
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If by accident transferred £2000 to buy something rather than £20.00 then would you expect the company to refund the difference? In the UK you'd be legally obligated to and society as a whole would consider your morally obligated to and I don't see either of those things as problems.
You didn't buy it, the company has explained the error and asked for it to be returned. As long as they bear the cost of doing so then people should be obliged to return it. Is it any wonder why there's looting in the States when there's a disaster etc when the attitude seems to be screw others for everything you can get away with; maybe it would be better to get back to trying for the high ground and "doing unto others, as you would have done unto you".
I'd certainly suggest the improved labour laws you list if not simply because I don't see why we wouldn't want everyone to have such basics. There was an article on conditions in an Amazon warehouse in the UK recently and although it was hardly inspiring it certainly made me glad for the laws we have in place: > The right to parental leave (no firing because your wife had a kid and you need to be somewhere else). > Expecting employees to pick items from above shoulder height or the ground being clear grounds for compensation in the case of injury; a legal system that would help fun the legal action and rules such that false solutions (like ladders you aren't given enough time to use) would be no defence. > A company is not allowed to expect unpaid work as part of standard duties (travelling to a designated rest zone is work) and reasonable standards on length and quantity of breaks. > The legal requirement to provide 28 days holiday pa and to only restrict or mandate this if there is a clear business need
I'd never suggest the UK is perfect in this regard but whenever I see a story about an employer in the US treating employees like consumables to chew up and throw out it makes me feel a little better about the fact I have to pay a penny or two more to buy things packed by people treated like humans rather than animals.
Right after I'm finished telling it to the families of the post carriage drivers who lost jobs when the telegram took off, the lamp lighters who lost jobs when electric street lights were invented, and the stable hands who got laid off when the auto-mobile replaced the horse for most transportation.
It used to take the vast majority of the time and efforts of society just to find and collect enough food not to starve. It's incredibly naive and short sighted to think that the concept of farming that decreased the work in foraging and hunting vastly was somehow a retrograde step or fundamentally different from automating picking stuff up and putting it in boxes. The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.
One of the weirdest arguments against legalising prostitution that I've ever heard was "No child grows up thinking 'I want to be a prostitute'"; as if somewhere out there are thousands of kids who want to be cleaners, warehouse drones, fast food cooks, temporary farm workers etc.
All other factors being equal that is true; although I have seen no evidence to suggest the gender or sexuality of the parents changes this. It is also categorically shown that better educated parents and wealthier parents tend to produce happier and more 'successful' children. I wouldn't be at all shocked to find that children brought up by a well educated, high earning single homosexual 'fare better' than children brought up by uneducated and poor married parents; that wouldn't however make me want to put in place laws to try and stop poor married couples having children.
We just recently, just, passed laws allowing gay marriage in the UK. In the UK we have very little open hostility to homosexuality, especially in the media. What that meant is that the majority of our representatives that voted against it (and lots did) made arguments based on marriage being a religious concept or, more strangely, for the purpose of founding a family.
One of the more memorable moments in the political debate was when a 50 year old female MP pointed out the hypocrisy of a colleague who made this argument by pointing out that he had just recently attended her wedding knowing full well that given her age she could never bear children. It seems apparent to me that the family argument is a cover for a different prejudice, as I know of no one using it who would object to the elderly or infertile getting married.
I think the point, though I'm not the original poster, is that marriage can and arguably should be separated from the legal rights of 'registered couples'. For example, if two close friends or siblings live together in later life then why should they be unable to share pensions etc just because their relationship never included physical attraction.
Churches, synagogues etc could still hold marriage ceremonies as could not religious institutions but a government official would register the couple as part of that process.
To be fair this isn't actually a new concept. One of the American founding fathers (I think, give me a break I'm not American or 250 years old) said something like: I must be a general so that my sons can be doctors and lawyers and their sons can be sculptors and artists.
There are people who are incredibly deprived in the world. Wouldn't helping them if we have the spare time and resources help uplift all our spirits? Wouldn't the pursuit of fundamental truths be the scientific or philosophical be a worthwhile endeavour when the need to build low quality consumable crap decreases?
What the founding fathers, and even we today, haven't really grasped is that we're obsessed with having 'more' such that we work nearly as many hours now even though our productivity has increased monumentally and yet feel less fulfilled.
Nah it's probably true and yet completely misleading. Amazon has increased its headcount 400% over 5 years, so it's probably true that they'll keep all the staff they currently have but cut down on seasonal hiring and not need to hire more people as they continue to grow. Ultimately it's neither a problem or their fault. Human advancement is built upon finding ways to decrease work and the reason Amazon is doing this is because we choose to buy from the cheapest company not the one employing the most people etc.
When the US government gives me the option to signup to being spied on, explains in its terms what it will do with the info etc then I'll be the first to agree it's the same thing. But they aren't; so let's stop with the stupid strawman attacks on these companies and welcome anything they do, no matter how cynical the reasons, to push the government to leave us the fuck alone.
Yes. He might not have had the ability to do anything to stop it by being President but if you are elected to that position and then realise that what is going on under your watch is wrong, unethical and against the fundamental principles of your country and that, furthermore, the system is such that you cannot effect the changes required via the authority invested in the office of President then you should have the courage to resign and say why.
Maybe if you weren't too lazy to work out what they were responding too you'd have realised he was saying that the employees of the agency shouldn't be doing bad things if they don't want to feel bad because the president doesn't want to be associated with them at the moment.
It could be directed at anyone with a conscience. He said don't do things that you'd feel back about doing if you don't want to feel bad. That's not remotely like saying "we can look at whatever we want because only people who have done things they don't want us to see should care".
I entirely disagree with the level, lack of oversight and fearmongering, of the security services currently. That said, when you've been doing this kind of shit for over a decade and getting regular pats on the back for it, the people as a whole love it etc I can see why they would take being hung out to dry hard. The government seems to be doing everything it can to let the NSA be the focus of blame here even though it almost certainly knew what was going on and likely condoned most of it.
Your exactly right. Unfortunately far too many people on here have already decided that anything open source is perfect and thus anything negative being reported, happening to or being linked to open source must be attacked.
Being open source isn't an excuse for breaking the law. Open source advocates will often highlight the fact that the code is available as meaning that it can be checked to ensure there's nothing hidden in there after all. You wouldn't have people on here defending Microsoft if they got sued for including a piece of freely distributed software in their product containing illegal functionality even though there's no difference (except they don't like Microsoft and love open source).
They shouldn't have to pay for all the damage caused by others however I think the case can be made for considering the damage caused by the whole group when punishing individuals involved. On a basic level a DDoS goes from ineffective to partially effective to effective when more people take part and on another level their involvement helped build up the critical mass behind the attack.
It costs virtually nothing to put up a sign and fence and is pretty much standard protocol. If vandalism was so bad in your area that you had to take considerably more action like paying guards, changing site layout etc then vandalism has cost you that money. Society normally puts a premium on punishments/fines etc to account for three (or more) things 1/ the odds of getting caught and 2/ the disproportionate costs crime can cause and 3/ to act as a deterrent.
If I steal £10 off someone in the street but then get caught a £10 fine won't put me off doing it again because I'm never worse off for doing it. £10 also isn't the real impact of my crime. Stealing the money may mean that my victim couldn't afford the bus and so lost 2 hours wages, they could feel unsafe in public, it could discourage other people from travelling to that area.
My crime, and the crimes of others, in combination have caused this and it is right that punishments consider it.
I don't agree with them, I don't like many many things about anonymous etc but punishing 14 comparatively minor parts of a DDoS attack as though they caused all the damage isn't moderate, responsible or effective. There is a difference between giving them a punishment that has a deterrent affect and this nonsense.
The issue, imo, is that an embarrassingly small number of people are being prosecuted for this (surely hundreds, or thousands, of the perpetrators existed in the US or countries that would cooperate. Instead of doing things properly and punishing a lot of people moderately, they are going to drop a bomb on 14 chumps and fully ruin their lives. Parts of the state are trying to avoid criticism about catching so few people by victimising the few they have.
It won't be an effective deterrent because so few people have been caught that the people involved will continue to think that the odds of being caught in future are tiny.
You're banned from US airspace not US airports specifically. Thus if that Cuba-Canada flight passes into US airspace you won't be allowed on it.
Have you read the contract by any chance? Of course you haven't. Do you have any idea what so ever if the contract includes a provision saying that you accept that it is not the airlines responsibility to ensure that the destination country won't reject you? Of course you don't. So you're someone with plenty of willingness to spout opinion and fuck all knowledge to base it on. If only people on here would stop sharing opinions based on nothing more than there uninformed and imagined version of what should happen. 5 minutes research on google could tell you whether people typically get refunds when this happens, then you could post something informative telling the rest of us about it.
You clearly don't understand how the no fly list operates. Airlines aren't allowed to tell someone they are rejecting them because they are on the no fly list (god knows how she got them to tell her). As you'd typically turn up at the airport and be turned away without explanation you're not going to get compensated by DHS because you'd never know, or be told, that they had anything to do with it.
I suppose you could theoretically try and start a lawsuit against the DHS if you got turned away from a flight that the no fly list applies to. However given that the list is secret so as to, supposedly, stop evil people realising the US government knows about them they aren't just going to say "oh you caught us".
I tell you what. America can ignore any district where the average household income is less than 1.5x the average household income in Shanghai? That would be ~$14,500 a year... Oh you mean you want to ignore American districts with vastly higher incomes than the highest income city in China because you see this as a competition to win, rather than a helpful warning that your education system isn't producing good results? Fine. You can just ignore it then, the rest of us will use it to work out how to improve our education systems and we'll see who made the right choice a decade from now.
Yeah. We should teach to the test like the South Koreans, I mean obviously we weren't teaching kids basic mathematics and problem solving skills before because who needs those right?
The amount of people who dismiss these tests who have absolutely no idea what they are testing, the methods etc really is quite incredible. I actually find it quite comforting that in the UK our coverage of the results has largely been acceptance of the fact our relative performance has fallen and some soul searching about how we deal with that; do we learn from Germany and Poland and how they reform or from places like South Korea with amazing results but extremely unhappy children.
Countries that dismiss the tests (seemingly a more common response in America) can stick there heads in the sand but the problem won't go away. If they don't make improvements now then they will pay the price 10+ years from now when the kids leaving school can't get into top jobs, universities etc because graduates from other countries that have improved outclass them.
You can certainly make a case for comparing a single city in a country against an entire country being misleading. However I really can't see the justification for trying to dismiss this because countries like Singapore are more urbanised. So what, it doesn't matter that Americans are crap at fundamental subjects like mathematics because some of them don't come from cities?
It might be easier to have a high standard of education in a more urbanised country but that doesn't stop it being a problem if you have a poor standard of education. Singapore is a country and has a population of over 5 million. Hong Kong is probably more a distinct country than Puerto Rico is and has a population of 7 million.
In general the view of UK schooling is that rural areas have better schools than most city areas. Getting good teachers into and improving schools in major cities like London and Birmingham has been an ongoing issue for government. That said rural areas in the UK are hardly remote by US standards.
That's one way you could look at it, especially if you think that an artist should be paid the equivalent of maybe £0.25 for an album sale. At less than £0.002 per sing play on Spotify that's what the artist would get for my playing a typical album around 10 times start to finish.
It's a shame that the debate seems to be dominated by the two extremes. The artists and record companies who want, for obvious reasons, music to cost more so that they can earn lots of money vs people who think copyright should be abolished and artists should have to make money only by touring, finding a patron or donations.
What I'd be interested to know is, would Anssi Kela have earned more than 2.64 Euro-cents per play of a sold album? If we made a not unreasonable assumption that an album is the equivalent of 30 full play throughs (I buy some I play through less, some people would listen on spotify but wouldn't buy it) then that's the equivalent of 80 Euro-cents profit to the artist per album sale. That sounds like a low return, but not when compared to what I expect an artist would typically earn on an album sold by a record label. If the 30 playthroughs is equivalent to an album sale metric is remotely reasonable then it would imply this artist is getting plays equivalent to 735 sales per month and is earning £584 a month for them.